All Rise...

The Charge

Heist no!

The Case

Val Kilmer (Willow) stars as John,
someone who acquires items to sell on the black market at considerable risk to
his well being. He operates on the fringes of legality, which is of course a
euphemism for "he's a dirty criminal." One day—Columbus Day, to
be specific—John lands the score of his life, an acquisition that will set
up him for life. Unfortunately, it also ensures that there will be attempts to
make him extremely dead.

So he takes off to Echo Park, where he desperately tries to wheel and deal
while simultaneously: a) cultivating a relationship with a precocious young boy,
b) outsmarting the authorities that have tapped his phone, c) setting up an
exchange with the most feared fence of them all and d) aggressively trying to
rekindle his relationship with a former flame (Marg Helgenberger).

Columbus Day wants to be a funny, smart-ass little thriller but it
fails at being both funny and thrilling. The black comic tone is there but
that's it. Val Kilmer, who has developed a true mastery of the sarcastic retort
over the years (his work here is reminiscent of what he was doing in the
similarly toned but far superior Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), tries his
hardest, but he simply doesn't have the writing to work with. The jokes rarely
hit; it's the kind of script that I surmise the writers thought was much
cleverer than it actually was. Example: the dynamic between John and the little
kid. This plotline dominates a surprising amount of the runtime, yet it yields
little interest. The kid is given adult lines to utter and John looks at him
with bewilderment and they go out on a paddleboat and perhaps that interaction
plays some role in John's mini-epiphany to win his lady-friend back, but
whatever the impact was to his character it was not worth the endless, tedious
banter.

Look, Columbus Day is one of those movies that do absolutely nothing
for me. Is there a chance you might find something worthwhile lurking here?
Sure, anything's possible. I mean, the finale moves along at nice clip, there's
some gunplay and dramatic music, the tension hits levels unseen earlier in the
film, and the ending is sort of satisfying, but it's not nearly enough to remedy
the pain from enduring a whole bunch of Not Much for the 90 minutes prior.

The DVD: a fine-looking 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, 2.0 stereo track and
no extras.